“Stop.” I pushed my finger against his lips, and his brows jumped as he smirked. “I don’t want it either. I don’t want any of it, and I have to wonder if I ever truly did.” His features creased with confusion. I smiled. “I wanted the magic I’d believed would come with it. I wanted what I was promised.”

“Promised?”

I nodded, climbing down from his arms. “Can I take you somewhere?”

He frowned, nodding once.

I took his hand. His fingers instantly snuck through mine, and I gestured for him to lean down. I was gifted a rare smile when I rose to my toes to kiss his cheek, then I clasped his other hand and tried my best to prepare for what I might discover as we left the fields.

“Your eyes are still closed,” Scythe said at my hairline, humor in his voice.

He kissed each one, causing me to smile and each eyelid to rise. He turned atop the small knoll we’d arrived on, its bulk still weathered from many a warping journey by my father and myself. “This was your home?”

My feet bare, I carefully traipsed closer to the wreckage.

Tears welled at the sight of the rubble, the exposed remaining bedchamber. “I haven’t been back. Not since I heard it had been destroyed.” The cottage that sat in the foothills of the mountains containing the towers, as well as a portion of the forest surrounding it, had been burned.

New life had unfurled. It crawled over the darkened bodies of trees and among the remaining stone of the home I’d grown up in.

“My father was a wolf,” I said. “One of great power that would see him become a general in the king’s military. My mother died not long after giving birth to me, so it was always just us. He would often return home with tales of his ventures with the king. Living here, we were close enough to the towers that he was able to come home each night and still be sent for if needed, yet far enough from them and the town village beyond these woods that it was peaceful.”

“It is,” Scythe said, peering up to the canopy of trees above the cottage, and to the remains of the small animal shelter some yards behind it. “Peaceful.”

“I miss it.” I released a humorless huff. “I’d spend so many days wandering the forest and the creeks, dragging our runt of a horse with me while pretending to be a princess.”

I circled a pile of blackened stone and glowing shrubbery while my wolf lowered onto a large rock, watching me. “Will we need a horse to keep the chickens company, then?”

I halted, staring over my shoulder at him.

“Did you think I’d forget?”

I smiled down at my feet, saying quietly, “Chickens will do.”